Well, I have been of many shows in Switzerland and Zürich is definitely the best for me. Compared to other shows (I remember the bad Stuttgart one) it has a good mixture of everything. The minerals are partly Swiss ones, partly worldwide and jewellery is maybe 20-30%. I do not think that there was too much jewellery. At all it depends what you are interest in. It is not an alpine quarz show, otherwise I would not have gone there (you can collect tons of quarz on every beach :evil:)
Like last year a miner from Trepca was selling very nice minerals in all sizes for very reasonable prices compared to what you find in the internet. He was selling simply by weight and I bought 10 kg in two pieces. If somebody comes up with stabilty: I do not know where that is derived from, but I have a 30 yrs old piece from Trepca from the collection of my father. Unaltered and stable. Maybe I make some pics of my Trepca stuff later.
There was also quite some stuff from Madan, which seems to be an attractive place. It was similar to the Trapca material but compared to the prices of the Trepca stuff it was too expensive.
I also bought a small book from 1921: This was the first report on the Herznach oolithic iron ore deposit. It describes the first adit and the first trials for processing and smelting. (Thats the stuff I gave Frank as a wedding present, if you have been there). The book was expensive but put my ore samples into a context, which is nice.
The only bad think to say was that the selling of the tickets was very, very slow and badly organised. After selling 10 tickets they went out of change, and had in total (I think) 9 different ticket prices. Instead of paper tickets you got a colored coin, causing even more confusion for the ticket seller to hand out the right color. A second after getting the coin you had to give it back at the entrance.....
Again: have fun, cheers,
Stefan
